After weeks at death’s door and just hours before his demise, Pope Francis on Easter Sunday met with Vice President J.D. Vance of Ohio. Vance hadn’t been scheduled for an official visit with the pontiff, and the meeting called attention to an issue that has divided Catholics and prominent Republicans in Ohio since last summer — immigration.
Francis, 88, died of a stroke early Monday. Last month, he was discharged from the hospital after a severe health crisis that included pneumonia.
He had clashed for years with President Donald Trump over Trump’s treatment of immigrants. In 2016, just after saying mass on the Mexican side of its border with the United States, Francis said that anyone who advocates building walls is “not Christian.” The Vatican later denied that the remark was directed at Trump, but the president has steadfastly advocated for a wall as he repeats false claims about migrants.
While Trump has pushed for a wall, Francis fought just as hard on behalf of migrants from the time he became pope in 2013. During that time, anti-immigrant rhetoric around the world has grown, while the number of forcibly displaced people has more than doubled, to 120 million, USA Today reported Monday.
In a 2015 speech to Congress, the pope implored lawmakers to help those crossing the southern border fleeing persecution and seeking opportunity.
“Is this not what we want for our own children?” Francis asked. “We must not be taken aback by their numbers, but rather view them as persons, seeing their faces and listening to their stories, trying to respond as best we can to their situation. To respond in a way which is always humane, just and fraternal. We need to avoid a common temptation nowadays: to discard whatever proves troublesome. Let us remember the Golden Rule: ‘Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.’”
He reiterated those sentiments in Sunday’s Easter message.
“I would like all of us to hope anew and to revive our trust in others, including those who are different than ourselves, or who come from distant lands, bringing unfamiliar customs, ways of life and ideas! For all of us are children of God!’” it said.
Those words stand in stark contrast to the words and actions of Trump and his administration. He has referred to immigrants as “not human” and “animals” who are “poisoning the blood” of the United States. Trump and his allies have referred to undocumented crossings as an “invasion” even after the rhetoric helped spur a racist mass murder in El Paso in 2019.
Trump now is deporting or trying to deport hundreds of thousands who came legally using the CBP One app, unknown numbers of foreign university students. He’s also dusted off a law not used since World War II to accuse undocumented migrants of gang affiliations and deport them to a notorious Salvadorean prison. The president has ignored court orders related to the latter deportations, and appears headed for a showdown with the U.S. Supreme Court in the matter.
Trump is also trying to end temporary protected status for hundreds of thousands of immigrants, including many Haitians in Springfield.
As the Caribbean nation has descended into chaos, those in the United States are terrified of being forced to return. But during a debate last summer, Trump repeated the racist lie that Haitians in Springfield were stealing their neighbors pets.
“In Springfield, they are eating the dogs,” he said. “The people that came in, they are eating the cats. They’re eating — they are eating the pets of the people that live there.”
In the ensuing furor, dozens of bomb threats were made against public buildings, including elementary schools.
As a U.S. Senator representing Ohio, those threats jeopardized Vance’s constituents. But he repeated the lies even after his staff knew they were untrue.
The episode divided some Ohio Republicans who also happened to be Catholic.
Vance became one in 2019. Gov. Mike DeWine is a lifelong Catholic who has stayed all executions since taking office and signed a harsh anti-abortion bill into law.
During last year’s firestorm in Springfield, the governor criticized Trump and Vance in the New York Times.
“I am saddened by how they and others continue to repeat claims that lack evidence and disparage the legal migrants living in Springfield,” DeWine wrote. “This rhetoric hurts the city and its people, and it hurts those who have spent their lives there.”
Less than two months later, Trump and Vance won the election. Then in January, the president of Haiti’s transitional presidential council met with Pope Francis at the Vatican and then said Trump’s planned deportations and aid cuts would be calamitous for his country.
In February, Francis wrote a letter to U.S. bishops saying that Trump would create a “major crisis” with the mass deportations he planned. The pope also slammed the interpretation of Catholic theology Vance used to justify them.
Vance had invoked the doctrine “ordo amoris” to claim that one should think of family, then community, then country ahead of the rest of the world.
The pope said that was wrong. He noted that Jesus himself was forced to seek refuge in a foreign land.
“Jesus Christ… did not live apart from the difficult experience of being expelled from his own land because of an imminent risk to his life, and from the experience of having to take refuge in a society and a culture foreign to his own,” Francis said in his letter.
He added that people should consider all as being part of their families and communities.
“The true ordo amoris that must be promoted is that which we discover by meditating constantly on the parable of the ‘Good Samaritan‘ that is, by meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception,” the pope said.
He then sank into a 38-day hospitalization. Then he rallied, defied doctors’ orders and spent a busy Easter Sunday, the most important day on the Christian calendar. And he made room for a brief meeting with Vance as one of his last acts.
Coming a day after the pope’s lieutenants said they talked to Vance about “difficult humanitarian situations, with particular attention to migrants, refugees, and prisoners,” the meeting seemed intended to send a message. “Pope Francis Gave JD Vance a serious lesson just hours before he died,” was the title of a column Hafiz Rashid wrote in The New Republic.
Vance honored the pontiff after his passing in a post on X. But he made no mention of migrants.
“I just learned of the passing of Pope Francis. My heart goes out to the millions of Christians all over the world who loved him,” he said. “I was happy to see him yesterday, though he was obviously very ill. But I’ll always remember him for the… homily he gave in the very early days of COVID. It was really quite beautiful. May God rest his soul.”
For his part, DeWine acknowledged the pope’s relentless advocacy for migrants.
“He was an inspiration to us and to millions around the world,” DeWine said in a written statement. “His genuine love of and devotion to all people — the poor, the unborn, those without a home, those emigrating to build a better life for themselves and their families, those of all faiths, and those with no faith — was evidenced to the world from the day he was selected to serve as Pope until his last public appearance on Easter Sunday.”
This report was first published by the Ohio Capital Journal, which like NC Newsline, is part of the national States Newsroom network.
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